Flip This Zombie (15 page)

“So,” The Kid said with a grin wide enough to split his face. “What are we doing now? Catching or killing zombies?”

I sent a side glance toward Dave and he sent the same toward me. At the moment, nothing was really resolved and neither one of us was in a big damned hurry to flinch first in our fight.

Before one of us could, though, The Kid pointed. “Better decide fast. Look, a loner zombie!”

I followed where he was pointing. We had turned back onto the main road that led to the highway. The overpass was about a quarter of a mile away, a big wide hill that led east or west down the 202 depending on which way you turned.

At the top of that big hill was a pacing zombie, almost like he was waiting for something. He was exactly the kind we wanted to catch since he was alone and in an area where there wasn’t much chance that something else was hiding. If we were going to keep catching, I guess a decision was going to have to be made about it.

Now
.

We all stared as Dave slowed the vehicle to nothing more than a crawl. We were so far away that unless we made a big noise or did something else to draw attention to ourselves, a zombie wouldn’t notice us.

Except that I could have sworn this one
did
. Its pacing slowed and it seemed to turn toward us and shift its weight.

“Get me the glock with the scope,” I said softly, waving my hand in the back toward The Kid.

I heard him shuffling around and then felt the heavy weight of the semi-automatic in my palm. I lifted the gun and peered through scope.

The zombie was everything we’d come to expect from the living dead. Gray skin, black sludge caked around the mouth, rotting body. Only this one still managed to be different somehow. For one thing, he was bigger than your average zombie. I’m not talking
Resident Evil ridiculous
, of course, but this guy had been a big boy in life, bigger even than the Arnold Schwarzenegger wannabe zombie I’d lured to our net trap yesterday.

But that wasn’t all that separated him from your average, run-of-the-mill infected bastard. Unlike the other zombies I’d seen over the past few months, his pacing had a purposeful quality to it. He wasn’t just shambling aimlessly. He was waiting. Watching.

And in that moment, he lifted his head and he looked right at us. Through the high-powered scope I could see pretty good detail on his face. There was no doubt about it, he was really looking.
Seeing
us even though we were too far away for most zombies to notice through their rotting eyes.

He tilted his head back and let out a moaning groan that was loud enough to be heard even all the way at our car.

“Shit, David,” I whispered, my tone laced with two emotions that bubbled inside of me like boiling oil. First there was fear, intense and powerful like I hadn’t felt since that awful moment when we saw a zombie for the first time.

But there was something else, too. Excitement. My
heart raced with it and my hands shook as I continued to stare through the scope.

“What is it?” he whispered.

I lowered the scope and looked at him. “I think
that
might be a bionic zombie.”

D
ave blinked as he looked at me. “What?”

I stared at him, overcome by the same disbelief that lined his face.

“
Bionic zombie
,” I repeated on nothing but a trembling breath.

With a shake of his head, Dave snatched the gun from my hand. For a moment, he hesitated, almost as if he didn’t
want
to look through the scope, but finally he lifted it and stared up the hill toward the pacing zombie.

I held my breath as I waited for him to say something,
anything
. But he didn’t. He just stared and stared through the scope. For a long time the car was silent until he finally lowered the weapon.

“Shit,” he muttered.

And that was all the reaction I got because just about the same time he finally said something the zombie started sprinting toward us. Sprinting. This wasn’t a hunter jog or
half-assed run. This was a Jackie Joyner-Kersee full-on
sprint
(minus the dragon lady nails, of course).

Now I don’t know what came over us. I mean, we’d fought probably thousands of zombies by this point (just the steering wheel car count was in the hundreds) and we’d always won those battles, even if they were sometimes close. After all these months, though, we knew what to do. Hell, we got
paid
for what we do.

But I guess neither of us wanted any part of this shit until we had more time to figure it out.

“Reverse, reverse!” I screamed as Dave threw it into just that gear and floored it backward.

The poor Kid flew around the back of the veering van, crashing into the metal walls and grappling for any kind of purchase as Dave spun the wheel to turn away from the monster rapidly approaching our vehicle.

“Please stop doing that!” Robbie bellowed between grunts as he slid around the back.

We both ignored him. Right now getting away was more important. Plus, we had antibiotic cream and Sponge-Bob Band-Aids! He’d be fine.

Our tires screeched against the asphalt as Dave plowed forward, sending up a plume of smoke behind us that stank of burned rubber and dust. We tore off down the long, deserted road at sixty miles an hour.

Dave kept driving for fifteen minutes at full speed. He leaned over the steering column, silent and strained, his knuckles white around the wheel as he merely stared out at the road ahead of us.

In the back, The Kid had bundled up against one of the van walls, his knees pulled up to his chest. He was picking at one of his ratty shoes without looking at either of us.

Which left me. Shaking. Stunned. And wanting to talk about what I’d seen so bad that I just couldn’t hold it in anymore. I finally turned toward David.

“It was bionic, wasn’t it?” I whispered.

He jolted, almost like he’d forgotten the rest of us were in the vehicle with him. For the first time, he lifted his foot a little from the gas pedal and we slowed down to a more reasonable speed for the school zone we were currently streaking through.

Although, to be fair to Dave, the school had burned down weeks ago, the only kids left there were probably zombie monsters, and there were no cops to ticket him for going sixty-three in a twenty anyway.

“I don’t know,” he said. His voice was shaking a little and he drew a breath to steady it. “Maybe not. I mean, maybe it was just a coincidence that the…
thing
was bigger and that it only
seemed
like it was… um…
aware
of us.”

I stared at him. “Are you
that
jaded? That blind?”

He glared at me. “What do you mean?”

I expelled a breath of frustration. “I
mean
that people in the camps and on the street have been talking about bionics for a couple of days now, but you said you could only believe what you see.”

“That’s true, Sarah,” Dave snapped. “It’s crazy to chase rainbows just because someone told you there was a leprechaun with a fucking pile of Lucky Charms at the end.”

I slammed my hands on the dash with enough force that it stung. “There
is
a motherfucking leprechaun, David! You just
saw
it. Just like you
saw
Kevin’s cure in the lab a couple of days ago. And yet you still doubt both of those things. You’re still looking for excuses as to why they aren’t true. Why? Is it because you’re scared?”

He slammed on the brake and in the back The Kid grunted pathetically as he slid on the metal van floor and sort of smooshed against the back of our seats.

Dave ignored his renewed whines and spun around to face me.

“Yes, I’m fucking scared, Sarah. And if you aren’t then you’re delusional and
crazy
. That
thing
back there, whatever it was, if it really is some kind of new breed of zombie that has even a fraction of higher brain function or greater strength… it means more of us are going to die.”

“Not necessarily!” I said, but my tone had no strength to it.

“Yes, necessarily,” he bellowed. “The only reason we have any chance against the horde now is that the zombies are stupider than Paris Fucking Hilton. They can’t figure out tactics or find ways to work together on any real scale. So we have an advantage. If they start to think, even just a tiny bit, the advantage goes out the window.”

I flinched, but he wasn’t done. His voice elevated.

“And since we somehow convinced ourselves we have to make our living in this world by chasing things that go bump in the night, that means
we
might die. Or worse, get bitten so that one of us might have to kill the other before they go all undead on everyone’s ass.”

“So wait, are you saying no more zombie catching, even no more zombie killing?” I gasped.

He gripped the steering wheel with both hands until his knuckles turned white. “Neither one of those activities seems like it’s going to ensure a nice old age with a retirement pension, Sarah.”

I blinked as I stared down at my rough hands. Once upon a time, when I worked in an office job, they’d been
soft. I’d even done home manicures and painted my nails all pretty. But today they were the hands of someone who worked to survive. Someone who had to.

But I missed manicures. I missed being able to sleep in on a Sunday and then have waffles. I missed being able to just watch bad television at night while I munched on microwave popcorn.

I missed normalcy even if I’d grown accustomed to not having it. Even if I’d accepted I’d probably never have it again.

I sighed. “I realize what you’re saying,” I said softly. “But I see what Kevin showed us in that lab. And I think
that
might help us get to an old age, though maybe not the pension.”

“Christ Sarah—” he started.

I touched his face. “No, just listen to me. Really listen. What if Barnes is right? What if what he has really
is
a cure and all this could end? What if we could go back to the way things were? What if we
all
could?”

It was The Kid who answered, not David.

“No more camps,” he whispered. Dave blinked before he looked back at him. The Kid was looking at us. “No more zombies to run from?”

I nodded, caught between my own hope and my desire not to give a child a false version of it.

“Maybe,” I finally offered weakly.

“Do you think there’s a Midwest Wall?” The Kid asked after a long hesitation.

I glanced at David. My husband didn’t believe in any of that stuff. But he was sitting quietly, so I shrugged as an answer.

“I don’t know. I’ve heard things, but we have to wait
out the winter up North before we even think about heading that way.”

The Kid’s shoulders slumped. “Oh.” He was quiet for a long moment and then he surprised me by continuing, “See, I have this aunt who lives in Nashville.”

“Yeah?” I encouraged him.

He nodded. “Maybe if there weren’t zombies, she would come and get me.”

I smiled. This was another one of those times when I remembered The Kid was, well, a kid.

“My mom lived in the middle of Illinois before the outbreak and I heard my Dad ran for Chicago when all this started,” I said. “Maybe they’d come get me, too.”

Dave smiled a little. “My parents are in Virginia,” he said. “I guess they might want to get me if there weren’t any zombies.”

I laughed. “Are you kidding? You’re probably on the back of milk cartons all over the East Coast. You’re the beloved baby of that family.”

His smile fell. We’d had to kill his sister when she turned zombie a few months back, so I guess that made him the only child now. I reached out and touched his arm as an apology for my stupidity.

“I’d rather say I tried to save the world than to wish I had,” I said softly.

There was a long hesitation before Dave surprised me by nodding. “Okay, so I guess that means we keep catching for Dr. Doom in his underground lair.”

I almost squealed in delight, but Dave looked so somber about the whole thing that I couldn’t exactly feel happy about it.